AT&T, the company that U.S. government broke into pieces due to antitrust, is gaining back gradually its monopoly position. Looking at the telecom market in the U.S., the breakup was not particularly effective and comparing to the mobile cellular phone technology of NTT's DoCoMo or of Europe, the U.S. technology in this area sucks.
The problem, as I see it, isn't that the breakup was ineffective, but that later Congresses decided to render it ineffective. They decided to make the market less competitive (or at least to allow for noncompetitive behavior) at a time when more competitive action was actually needed. Nominally, the system was opened up a bit. But as we've seen with the demise of so many dsl providers (for instance), it wasn't really very open. These crazy mergers are making it less open.
I think a MS breakup would be a good thing. I'm not sure that there' a solid legal case for it; in fact, I think the legal case is probably quite bogus. But I think that from a consumer's point of view it would be a good thing. If that doesn't happen, the next best thing would be to require that all file formats be nonproprietary and publicly odcumented. That goes for everyone, not just MS. In fact, that would probably be even more beneficial to consumers than a breakup, since it would force actual competitive behavior.
But for those who don't play games, or even don't play games which require particularly low latency (such as freeciv), sattelite internet could be a nearly ideal option in the future.
To my way of thinking, the primary problem to be solved is that of realising decent upload speeds without using an inordinately large dish. It surely can be done, however.
If sattelite access ever does achieve its potential, it will (at least potentially) allow for true competition in the market, unlike the halfway government sanction monopolistic crap we have to deal with, wherever we are, now.
In the meantime, though, I'll have to simply dream of living in the middle of nowhere with a decent connection.
You list several ``command line'' browsers, but none of them actually is a ``command line'' program.
It's a common misconception that many people have; they refer to programs which run in a console as command line, but in fact this is very far from the truth. A command line program is one which is non-interactive. As such, lynx -dump could be referred to as a command line program, but I'm not aware that any of the others could be.
To simplify, a command line browser - in fact, a command line anything - is one that can be invoked from a script without any manual intervention.
It would be good to check my bank balance periodically, although it might be a bit depressing!
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The problem, as I see it, isn't that the breakup was ineffective, but that later Congresses decided to render it ineffective. They decided to make the market less competitive (or at least to allow for noncompetitive behavior) at a time when more competitive action was actually needed. Nominally, the system was opened up a bit. But as we've seen with the demise of so many dsl providers (for instance), it wasn't really very open. These crazy mergers are making it less open.
I think a MS breakup would be a good thing. I'm not sure that there' a solid legal case for it; in fact, I think the legal case is probably quite bogus. But I think that from a consumer's point of view it would be a good thing. If that doesn't happen, the next best thing would be to require that all file formats be nonproprietary and publicly odcumented. That goes for everyone, not just MS. In fact, that would probably be even more beneficial to consumers than a breakup, since it would force actual competitive behavior.
To my way of thinking, the primary problem to be solved is that of realising decent upload speeds without using an inordinately large dish. It surely can be done, however.
If sattelite access ever does achieve its potential, it will (at least potentially) allow for true competition in the market, unlike the halfway government sanction monopolistic crap we have to deal with, wherever we are, now.
In the meantime, though, I'll have to simply dream of living in the middle of nowhere with a decent connection.
It's a common misconception that many people have; they refer to programs which run in a console as command line, but in fact this is very far from the truth. A command line program is one which is non-interactive. As such, lynx -dump could be referred to as a command line program, but I'm not aware that any of the others could be.
To simplify, a command line browser - in fact, a command line anything - is one that can be invoked from a script without any manual intervention.
It would be good to check my bank balance periodically, although it might be a bit depressing!